Enter here if you too are among the irrationally passionate.

I have stepped across the threshold into the New Year of 2020, leaving the Blue Door ajar behind me.

Threshold of the known world

The Blue Door has beckoned me since one night last spring, when my daughter and I sat down at the diningroom table for some late-evening unwinding and conversation…tea, coloring book, and a variety of magic markers at hand. 

Through the following months, I have propped up this image in several places where my gaze fell naturally on it. The blue door has evoked excitement and trepidation. Mystery and speculation. Dreams and fantasy. Calculations and plans. The edge of my known world.

 

The doorway effect

Now on the other side of this threshold, propelled by the consensual logic of the Gregorian calendar,  I experience some version of “the doorway effect” – how psychologist Gabriel Radvansky first described the science behind that familiar question, “Why did I walk into the kitchen?!”  

A small version of the great Life Meaning Questions: “What was I born to do? And more fundamentally “who am I meant to become?”

 

 

I am meant to be right-sized

Like Alice in Wonderland, I have long sought some magic potion that would right-size me: render me big enough or small enough for the life task at hand. 

I find I no longer have the energy or heart to try and sustain anything but being the size I am, doing the best I can with Life among the vines: twists and turns in my own mind, in the affairs of family and friendships, in the disruptions, chaos, and innumerable kindnesses of the World at Large.

My personal life and struggles and the lives and struggles unfolding across the planet are my one single life to live.

 

 

 

…and irrationally passionate

Who I was born to be is one of the “irrationally passionate.”  My motivation to change, heal, awaken is driven by my lived experience and conviction that my own particular pains and the pains of the brokenness of the world are both personal. And are both impersonal, in the sense of the Jewish teaching: healing this broken world is not mine to complete, neither am I free to desist from it.

 

 

 

A life of practice, in practice

A life of practice: more human, not more perfect.

A life of practice I am now wedded to as activist and elder, as well as healer and herbalist.

A life of practice that includes daily life lived with a widening and deepening inclusion of the varieties of humanity and our cultural struggles.

A life of practice that invites the Radical Inclusion of the inner work of race and gender, deeply nourishing to our souls and our evolution.

No choice but to know, intimately,
my yearnings, aversions, despairs:
instructive, dignifying, and precious,
a true north stretched out over empty space,
an earth suspended over Nothing,
 
the very features of
God’s world
and my way home.

A covenant of birth, by Sara Eisenberg

In 2020 I return to posting bi-monthly.

I’d love to hear from you in return: what are the questions that deeply matter to you, the discoveries you are making about living more humanly?

 

If you too are “irrationally passionate,” if the world matters to you in these ways, let’s continue to travel and explore together…and bring your friends along by sharing this link with them.

To explore working 1/1 together, or to discuss offering an online or in-person workshop for your group or organization, schedule a 30-minute free consult.